On October 17, 2014, two women who attend Brown University were given a date rape drug at a Phi Kappa Psi party on Brown’s campus. The following day, one of the women reported to the university that another student had sexually assaulted her. On February 21, following several months of investigation at the end of which Brown University deemed laboratory...

Police Militarization in Providence

by Malcolm Drenttel

In 2006 Glenn Reynolds wrote about the threat of police militarization in Popular Mechanics: “Soldiers and police are supposed to be different. Soldiers are aimed at enemies from outside the country. They are trained to kill those enemies, and their supporters. In fact, ‘killing people and breaking things’ are their main reasons for existence. Police look inward. They’re supposed to protect...

The Childhood Education Debate That’s Really About Adults

by Sara Winnick

According to Leanne Barrett, senior analyst at the policy and advocacy center Kids Count Rhode Island, five state departments currently oversee the creation, funding, and administration of early childhood education services for children ages zero to five in Rhode Island. The Departments of Education; Human Services; Children, Youth, and Families; Health; and the Medicaid Office manage four major avenues through which...

The Medical Repercussions of Segregation

by Jennifer Tsai

In medical school, class is scheduled for approximately 30 hours a week. This includes lectures on basic life sciences, histology, anatomy, and clinical examination skills. In addition, my first semester included approximately three hours of classroom time a month devoted to a supplemental curriculum called Health Systems and Policy, which covers the legal aspects of health care, public policy, and, briefly,...

A Narrative Week in Review

by Dash Elhauge

In 2013, Slate published a piece entitled “You Won’t Finish This Article.” Using a web analytics software called Chartbeat, Slate discovered that by the third sentence of a typical online Slate articles, 38 percent of readers were gone. The average reader made it halfway. Slate isn’t the only publication having this problem. The American Press Institute reported this May that 59%...

An Afternoon with the Connecticut Wreckers

by William Underwood

For Connecticut Wreckers owner and head coach Gary Peloso, women’s tackle football was never a likely landing place. “My wife saw an advertisement for a women’s football team in the paper,” he recalled. “I had no idea. Women’s football?” Though Peloso has spent much of his life around football, including years of coaching at the high school level, it’s not surprising...

The Indy wants to be your friend. Quickly, double-check your email, fold your laundry, and update a few items on your Linkedin profile because from here on out, the Indy’s going to take you out and let you know it’s okay. Open up the color spread in an empty bathtub and lay into it for a warm hug, letting the water...

Choice & the Church in Rhode Island

by Jane Argodale

In the United States, Catholic women will have abortions at about the same rate as other women—one in three by age 45—according to a 2014 study published by the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice organization that conducts research on abortion and contraception. They also use contraception at the same rate as other women. In January 2012, President Obama declined to overturn the...

“We use chaos as a gateway to the unknown creating a new path. Nothing that can be measured by skill or talent, that of which we have very little of. Our path is forged by passion and ingenuity. In a world full of sportsmen, here stand a few real dudes; has-beens and never was nobodies, modern day skate jesters ready to...

I don’t tell people about how when I was nine I couldn’t go to sleep without counting all of the markers and pens I owned and lining them up in jars on my desk. I don’t talk about the fact that I rewrote my notes in high school so that they were color-coded and took up an even number of pages....

No Beef Let me paint you a quick portrait of modern India. In my neighborhood there’s a housing colony that has taken it upon itself to evict residents and businesses that aren’t vegetarian. We call them the eggshell mafia because they look for evidence in the trash in order to find their next victim. At the local McDonald’s, one of the...